Portrait of My Father as a Pianist

Behind disinfected curtains,
beyond touch of sunrise
devouring the terrible gold
of leaves, a man could be
his own eternal night. City
flattened to rubble, his
surviving height a black flight
of notes: the chip-toothed
blade and oldest anesthetic.
Escaped convict, he climbs
wild-eyed, one hand out—
running its twin on the rails
of a broken Steinway. Who
has not been found guilty
of a carrion cry—the dream
of a feathered departure
one has not earned, then fall
back down teeming fault lines
of the flesh? Memory recedes
into nocturne, a kingdom born
of spruce and fading light—
he reaches in the end what
he had to begin with: fingertips
on corrupted tissue, cathedral
of octaves in his thinning
breath, tears like small stubborn
gods refusing to fall.

“I spent many late nights playing an old donated Steinway in the visitor's lounge of the cancer ward when my father was dying. If only by imagination, I wanted to give him one of his lifelong, unfulfilled dreams—to play the piano. In the poem, he takes my place as the pianist, or rather, he is fused with me—he stays, which is my unfulfilled dream. The poem’s form roughly invokes the Steinway’s keys, many of which were missing so that from across the room, when it was silent and alone, what was left resembled in the autumn light, stanzas.”

Cynthia Dewi Oka is the author of Salvage, forthcoming this month from Northwestern University Press. She is a community organizer with the New Sanctuary Movement of Philadelphia and lives in Collingswood, New Jersey.